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Who said nearly 50 years ago that Israel was an apartheid state?

By Ronnie Kasrils

"...a
colonial racist mentality which rationalised the genocide of the
indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, in Africa from
Namibia to the Congo and elsewhere, most clearly has its parallels in
Palestine."

March 17, 2009 -- Media Monitors Network -- At the onset of international “Israel
Apartheid Week” in solidarity with the embattled Palestinian people, I
want to start by quoting a South African who emphatically stated as far
back as 1963 that “Israel is an apartheid state”. Those were not the
words of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu or Joe Slovo, but were uttered
by none other than the architect of apartheid itself, racist Prime
Minister Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.

He was irked by the criticism of
apartheid policy and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “Winds of Change” speech, in
contrast to the West’s unconditional support for Zionist Israel.

To
be sure Verwoerd was correct. Both states preached and implemented a
policy based on racial ethnicity; the sole claim of Jews in Israel and
whites in South Africa to exclusive citizenship; monopolised rights in
law regarding the ownership of land, property, business; superior
access to education, health, social, sporting and cultural amenities,
pensions and municipal services at the expense of the original
indigenous population; the virtual monopoly membership of military and
security forces, and privileged development along their own racial
supremacist lines -- even both countries' marriage laws were designed to
safeguard racial “purity”.

The so-called “non-whites” in
apartheid South Africa, indigenous Africans, others of mixed race or of
Indian origin -- like second or third class non-Jews in Israel -- were
consigned to a non-citizenship status of Kafkaesque existence, subject
to bureaucratic whims and the laws prohibiting their free movement,
access to work and trade, dictating where they could reside and so
forth.

Verwoerd would have been well aware of Israel’s
dispossession of indigenous Palestinians in 1948 -- the year his
apartheid party similarly came to power -- of the unfolding destruction
of their villages, the premeditated massacres and the systematic ethnic
cleansing.

Within a few short years the apartheid regime was
ruthlessly clearing South Africa’s cities and towns of so-called “black
spots” -- where the “non-whites” lived, socialised, studied and traded --
bulldozing homes, loading families onto military trucks, and forcibly
relocating them to distant settlements. Unlike the “native reserves” --
soon to be reconstituted as bantustans -- not too far away from
industrial areas because the economy thrived on a quota of cheap black
labour.

Whilst he did not live to see the division of Palestinian
territory after the Six Day War, and the subsequent creation of
miniscule bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza, he would have greatly
admired and approved of the machinations that enclosed the Palestinians
in their own ghettoised prisons. This after all was the Verwoerdian
grand plan, and the reason why former US President Jimmy Carter could so readily identify
the Occupied Palestinian Territories as being akin to apartheid. In
fact the bantustans consisted of 13% of apartheid South Africa,
uncannily comparable to the derisory, ever-shrinking pieces of ground
Israel is consigning to the Palestinians.

A further comment about
the bantustans. When I visited Yasser Arafat in his virtually
demolished headquarters in Ramallah as part of a South African
delegation in 2004, he pointed around him and said: “See this is nothing
but a bantustan!” No, we responded, pointing out that no bantustan, in
fact not even our townships, had been bombed by warplanes, pulverised
by tanks. To a wide-eyed Arafat we pointed out that apartheid Pretoria pumped in
funds, constructed impressive administration buildings, even allowed
for bantustan airlines to service the Mickey Mouse capitals in order to
impress the world that they were serious about so-called “separate
development”.

Impunity

What Verwoerd admired too was the impunity with
which Israel exercised state violence and terror to get its way,
without hindrance from its Western allies, increasingly key among them
the USA. What Verwoerd and his ilk came to admire in Israel, and seek
to emulate in the southern African region, was the way the Western
powers permitted an imperialist Israel to use its unbridled military
with impunity in expanding its territory and holding back the rising
tide of Arab nationalism in its neighbourhood..

After the Six Day
War, Verwoerd’s successor John Vorster infamously stated: “The
Israelis have beaten the Arabs before lunchtime. We will eat the
African states for breakfast.”

But it was not only the racial
doctrine of Israel that excited apartheid’s leaders, it was the use of
the biblical narrative as the ideological rationale to justify its
vision, aims and methods.

The early Dutch pioneers, the
Afrikaners, had used Bible and gun as colonisers elsewhere to carve
out their exclusive fortress bastion in South Africa’s hinterland. Like
the biblical Israelites, they claimed to be “God’s chosen people” with a
mission to tame and civilise the wilderness; disregarding the
productivity and industriousness of people who had tilled the soil and
traded for centuries -- claiming it was only they who would make the
land flow with milk and honey. They invoked a covenant with God to
deliver their enemies into their hands and to bless their deeds. Until
the advent of South Africa’s democracy, the racial history books
generally taught that the white man arrived in South Africa more or
less as the so-called “Bantu tribes” from the north were wandering
across the Limpopo -- South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe -- and that
they the were pioneer settlers in a land without people.

Such a
colonial racist mentality which rationalised the genocide of the
indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, in Africa from
Namibia to the Congo and elsewhere, most clearly has its parallels in
Palestine.

What is so shameless about this anachronistic colonial
barbarism is that Zionist Israel has been permitted by the West to
aspire to such a goal even into the 21st century.

Allies in apartheid

It is by no
means difficult to recognise from afar, as Verwoerd had been able to
do, that Israel is indeed an apartheid state. Verwoerd’s successor
Balthazar John Vorster visited Israel after the 1973 October War, when
Egypt in a rare victory regained the Suez Canal and Sinai from Israel.
After that Israel and South Africa were virtually twinned as military
allies for Pretoria helped supply Israel militarily in the immediacy of
its 1973 setback and Israel came to support apartheid South Africa at
the height of sanctions with weaponry and technology -- from naval ships
and the conversion of supersonic fighter planes to assistance in
building six nuclear bombs and the creation of an arms industry.

For
the liberation movements of southern Africa, Israel and apartheid South
Africa represented a racist, colonial axis. It was noted that people
like Vorster had been Nazi sympathisers, interned during World War II --
yet feted as heroes in Israel and incidentally never again referred to
by South African Zionists as an anti-Semite!. This did not surprise
those that came to understand the true racist nature and character of
Zionist Israel.

Time and space does not allow further
elaboration, but it is instructive to add that in its conduct and
methods of repression, Israel came to resemble more and more apartheid
South Africa at its zenith -- even surpassing its brutality, house
demolitions, removal of communities, targeted assassinations,
massacres, imprisonment and torture of its opponents, collective
punishment and the aggression against neighbouring states.

Certainly we South Africans can identify the pathological cause, fuelling the
hate, of Israel’s political-military elite and public in general.
Neither is this difficult for anyone acquainted with colonial history
to understand the way in which deliberately cultivated race hate
inculcates a justification for the most atrocious and inhumane actions
against even defenceless civilians -- women, children, the elderly
amongst them. In fact was this not the pathological racist ideology
that fuelled Hitler’s war lust and implementation of the Holocaust?

`Far worse'

I
will state clearly, without exaggeration, that any South African,
whether involved in the freedom struggle or motivated by basic human
decency, who visits the Occupied Palestinian Territories is shocked to
the core at the situation they encounter and agree with Archbishop
Tutu’s comment that what the Palestinians are experiencing is far worse
than what happened in South Africa, where the Sharpeville massacre of
69 civilians in 1960 became international symbol of apartheid cruelty.

I
want to recall here the words of an Israeli cabinet minister Aharon
Cizling in 1948, after the savagery of the Deir Yassin massacre of 240
villagers became known. He said: “Now we too have behaved like the
Nazis and my whole being is shaken.”

Recently, the veteran British
MP, Gerald Kaufman, long-time friend of Israel, was reported as
remarking that a spokeswoman of the Israel Defence Force, talked like
a Nazi, when she coldly dismissed the deaths of defenceless civilians
in Gaza -- many women and children amongst them.

It needs to be
frankly raised that if the crimes of the Holocaust are at the top end
of the scale of human barbarity in modern times, where do we place the
human cost of what has so recently occurred in Gaza and against the
Palestinians since 1948 in the nakba (catastrophe) they have endured?

How
do we evaluate the inhumanity of dropping bombs and blazing white
phosphorous on civilian populations, burning people alive, gassing them
in a Gaza ghetto under relentless siege with no place to run or hide.
For 22 days of relentless bombardment whole families were vaporised before the
horrified eyes of a surviving parent or child.

Guernica, Lidice,
the Warsaw Ghetto, Deir Yassin, Mai Lei, Sabra and Shatilla,
Sharpeville are high on that scale -- and the perpetrators of the
slaughter in Gaza are the off-spring of Holocaust victims yet again, in
Cizling’s words, behaving like Nazis. This must not be allowed to go
unpunished and the international community must demand they be tried
for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

For the lesson is that if
apartheid Israel is not stopped in its tracks these crimes will get
greater and spread not only to engulf the entire Middle East and Iran,
but indeed anywhere that Israel is challenged. Like the apartheid
security forces, the hand of Mossad stretches very far indeed. And of
course with Israel a key ally in the USA’s “War on Terror” and all the
motives for that onslaught, oil resources included, there will be no
end to this bloody saga -- with the Palestinians targeted to go the way
of the extinct peoples of the former colonial era.

But such a
fate must not and will not happen, if together with the unconquerable
Palestinian people we share the resolve and determination to halt this
insidious Zionist project, and its Great Power backing and
encouragement.

Once more, let me turn to our South African experience.

International solidarity

There,
as with other struggles such as Vietnam, Algeria, the former Portuguese
colonies, the just nature of the struggle was the assurance for success.

With
that moral advantage, on the basis of a just liberation struggle, we
learnt the secret of Vietnam’s victory and strategised according to
what we termed our Four Pillars of Struggle: Political mass struggle; reinforced by armed struggle; clandestine underground struggle; and international solidarity.

At
times any one of these can become predominant and it is not for
outsiders to direct those at the frontline of struggle what and how to
choose but to modestly provide the lessons of our experience pointing
out that the unity of the struggling people is as indispensable as the
moral high-ground they occupy. For the Vietnamese the military element
was generally primary but always resting on popular mass support.

In
South Africa the mass struggle became the primary way, with sabotage
actions and limited guerrilla operations inspiring our people. It all
depends on the conditions and the situation.

But unquestioningly,
what helped tip the balance, in Vietnam and South Africa, was the force
and power of international solidarity action. It took some 30 years but
the worldwide anti-apartheid movement's campaigns -- launched in London
in 1959 -- for boycott, divestment and sanctions -- not only provided
international activists with a practical role, but became an
incalculable factor in (a) isolating and weakening the apartheid regime,
(b) inspiring the struggling people, (c) undermining the resolve of
those states that supported and benefited from relations with apartheid
South Africa, (d) generated a change of attitude among the South
African white public generally, and political, business, professional,
academic, religious and sporting associations in particular.

Boycotts
made them feel the pinch in their pockets and by their polecat status
-- whether on the sporting fields, at academic or business
conventions, in the world of theatre and the arts they were totally
shunned like biblical lepers. There was literally no place to hide from
universal condemnation backed by decisive and relentless action which
in time became more and more creatve.

Spare no effort

To conclude: we must spare
no effort in building a worldwide solidarity movement to emulate the
success of the anti-apartheid movement which played such a crucial role
in toppling the apartheid regime in South Africa. Nelson Mandela stated
after South Africa attained democratic rule that, “we South Africans
cannot feel free until the Palestinians are free”. A slogan of South
Africa’s liberation struggle and our trade union movement is “An injury
to one is an injury to all!“. That goes for the whole of humanity. Every
act of solidarity demonstrates to the Palestinians and those courageous
Jews who stand by them in Israel that they are not alone.

Israel
has lost in Gaza. While many Palestinians have lost their lives the
Palestinians have not been conquered or cowed. Repression generates
resistance and that will grow. Israeli aggression stands exposed. A
turning point has been reached in humanity‘s perception of this issue.
The time is ripe for us to drive home the advantage.

When 150,000
Palestinians within Israel itself demonstrated against the carnage in
Gaza; when Jewish women staged a sit-in in at the Israel consulate in
Toronto; when Norwegian tram drivers stopped their transport in
sympathy; when municipalities and colleges decide to divest, as did
Hampshire college in the USA (the first that took this step against
apartheid South Africa), when Durban dockworkers refused to unload a
ship with Israeli cargo; joining with the countless thousands around
the world, from Australia to Britain to Belgium to Canada to Cairo,
Jordan, Indonesia and the USA, we know the times are changing and
Zionist hegemony is fast losing control.

Boycott, divestment and sanctions represents three words
that will help bring about the defeat of Zionist Israel and victory for
Palestine. Like South Africa, this can mean, must mean: freedom, peace,
security, equality and justice for all -- Muslim, Christian and Jew.
That is well worth struggling for!

[This speech first appeared at www.MediaMonitors.net. It has been posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with Media Monitors' permission. Ronnie Kasrils was a long-time activist against the apartheid system in South Africa. He was South Africa's minister for intelligence services from April 2004 to September 2008. He was a member of the national executive committee of the African National Congress from 1987 to 2007, as well as a member of the central committee of the South African Communist Party from December 1986 to 2007. Kasrils' grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Latvia and Lithuania who fled from tsarist pogroms at the end of the 19th century. His autobiography, Armed and Dangerous, was first published in 1993.]